Georgina
Wonderful, even better than I expected. Thank you for making me feel so good and less alone. And I'm very impressed with your courage in speaking out about the king's new clothes.
I believe you'll find Edwin's C field is an excellent approximation of the medium needed to convert from object to received reality. ..Wow, perhaps there really IS a chance we might help finally drag physics out of this deep conceptual rut!
I have 3 points. Just one alone to take you to task on, and two I hope will help, all related.
1/ I'm not sure how carefully you considered c being affected by gravity. Of course light does c in a vertical vacuum on earth as well as deep space. It may well of course be red shifted (going up)as EA suggested. But of course time dilation does that job, or does it? There is a lot going on here, but I think I've unravelled the complex puzzle to offer an answer. - viz;
2/ You correctly identify "the greater the mass the greater the inertia", but how do we explain that a '100 ton' asteroid exerts more gravity passing Earth at 0.3c as 0.1c. (Equivalence of Grav v Inertial Mass) Yet to someone travelling alongside it, it does not??!
OK, firstly our ether is needed, oops! ..I'll call it our dark energy 'C' field. Now, when our rock flies through it it can condense the plasma of ionised particles that we know it does.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(79)90092-7
Stokes parameters for Thomson scattering in a cold magnetized plasma Astrophysics and Space Science Volume 218, No 1, 87-100, DOI: 10.1007/BF006580680Diffuse Ion Scattering in front of the Earth's Quasi-Parallel Bow Shock.American GPhysUnion. SOA/NASA
2010. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMSM51B1806K
http://iopscience.iop.org/1475-7516/2011/01/009
Ooops, sorry, ..got carried away, but, quantitively, they found 2' of arc diffraction through a comet coma tail recently. These particles of course have inertial mass, and, .. now wasn't there something that inertial mass equals?!
There goes that thing that looks just like duck again - now in every detail.
(It tasted good too, so the paper went in yesterday - but will almost certainly be rejected like the last one, as it challenges relativity).
3/ Dammit, I knew I should have written it down! Anyway. You've done a brilliant job further and very eloquently expose the shortcomings of our interpretation of Relativity, but it will never be superceeded till we find how things really DO work. I hope now you'll far better understand my own essay than last year.
The key experiment can be done with a glass of beer or plasma in a bar. If you could see a light pulse being scattered through it; Does the subjective apparent speed you see change by c/n or c/n +/- v when your friend Hendrik slides it at ever faster v past you along the bar?
Oh and thanks for the credit! I have a horrid feeling you got squeezed out of mine on the cutting room floor! My sincerest apologies, ..but highest rating!
Peter